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• AI is developing at a rapid pace and the rate of growth is exponential as advancements and research is incorporated into future experiments and creations.

• Not all AI's are intelligent as proven by a recent attempt to use the technology in video production.

It never ceases to amaze me how quickly technology advances. I remember when my parents bought an Apple Macintosh computer when I was in Primary school. It was the coolest thing ever! It had games like Star Wars and bricks! It could even access the internet with a dial-up modem! These were glorious days for technology as kingpins like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were just getting started transforming our world through innovation! But looking at where we are now, all those cool systems of the past, they seem like toys compared to what is available today!

The term ‘Artificial Intelligence’ didn’t even exist in my lexicon when I was growing up. Today I hear the term splattered all across the internet, in cafes and when I open a newspaper (yes they still exist but just barely!). The speed and pace of technological advancements being made by the world's top scientists and computer engineers in the field of AI will simply shock and amaze you.

In this article, I will explain why artificial intelligence is moving beyond recognition and that fact is demonstrated by recent developments coming out of Google's DeepMind program.

First off, if you've ever used Google products, you may or may not be familiar with Google's AI voice…

There are two settings, one for male and one for female voice and when you hear it you'll know something is majorly off with unnatural pronunciation similar to that of Apple's Siri or Microsoft's Cortana.

Even though this technology has ceased to impress on many occasions, every year the unnatural sound that computer generated voices make is becoming less recognizable.

Just last year Google made a breakthrough and developed a technology sounds much less robotic and much more like a human voice! In fact, the new ‘Tacotron 2’ Google voice AI is almost undistinguishable from a human voice!

You won’t believe this! In fact, I won’t have to work very hard to convince you why it is such a groundbreaking advancement of modern text to speech AI functionality! All you need to do is click play and see for yourself:

In a research paper published by Google, the ‘Tacotron 2’ team introduces details regarding the impressive speech system. In the paper, Google highlights the system’s ability to speak almost identically to its human creators.

The team describes the second-generation speech system in the report stating, "The Tacotron 2 is a neural network architecture for speech synthesis directly from text. The system is composed of a recurrent sequence-to-sequence feature prediction network that maps character embeddings to mel-scale spectrograms, followed by a modified WaveNet model acting as a vocoder to synthesize timedomain waveforms from those spectrograms."

But I can summarize it all in just one word… Wow!

According to the report, the technology that powers this new text to speech tool consists of two deep neural networks. Basically, the way it works is that the first network translates the text into a spectrogram. After the spectrogram has been made it is sent to WaveNet, a new system specially designed by Google's Deep Mind AI program. The process results in a computer generated voice that sounds like its human counterparts.

But digging a bit deeper, I have to ask the question, do we really want AI to have voices that sound identical to those of human beings? How will we know who or what we are talking to when we take the next call from the mystery number? These are the same problems of the famous movie ‘Blade Runner,’ a move which I absolutely love still to this day!

Well now that I’ve asked a philosophical question and took a bit of time to reflect, let’s move on shall we? Google and employees of their DeepMind program have been busy indeed developing AI systems that are already starting to be incorporated into our real, everyday world.

But it is important to note for every accomplishment a few failures needed to be made first!

There are other’s developing AI systems and not everyone paints the Mona Lisa on their first try…